Mono and other Area Tribes

Within the first years of its existence, the Fresno River Reservation, created as a result of the 1851 treaties, operated as a series of small “Indian farms”, including the Fresno River Farm, which was located in the immediate vicinity of the present-day City of Madera and which soon became the headquarters for the entire reservation. Many Northfork Mono and other local tribes consequently relinquished their traditional lands and nomadic ways and moved to the Fresno River Farm/Reservation. Eventually, the Mono outnumbered those from any other tribal designation on the reservation, where they sought protection and assistance and participated in farming. The new Indian reservation near the current City of Madera was plagued from the start. These ‘first farmers of the San Joaquin Valley’ faced multiple obstacles to successful cultivation, including harsh farming conditions, neglectful and corrupt administrators, and encroaching settlers who impinged upon the official reservation lands. To survive, Natives supplemented meager reservation yields with traditional subsistence activities in the familiar environs of the surrounding foothills and rivers. By 1860, after barely a decade, the Federal Government abandoned the reservation and farms and ancestors of the Tribe, who a decade earlier had rights to millions of acres, were now landless.